I then managed to shout to a fireman, asking if this was the very same lorry, in the exact same position, I had passed when driving in the opposite direction two days before.

The shock on his face that a member of the public dared to challenge him by asking a question – quite a reasonable one, I thought, and one begun with an ‘Excuse me!’ – was palpable.

If this was the same lorry, I was thinking, why had there been no signs warning motorists in advance to choose a different route?

And if a second lorry had been felled by this roundabout in the space of two days, then perhaps something needed to be done about its safety.

Needless to say, I got no answer from the fireman.

My fellow motorists and I were completely ignored as we crawled the few yards around a diversion.

If a policeman had stood there cheerily explaining things and saluting as we went past, instead of eating and chatting, how different would we have felt?

As usual we were just faceless members of the public, to be herded around wordlessly.

I honestly don’t know how people function in this country any more.

I am moving house, so I phoned BT to inform them, and give them my new details.

This took over one hour 15 minutes.

The woman on the phone, who told me I didn’t have to repeat things six times as she had moved people many times before, and really needed to go on her break, then cut my phone and broadband off a month early, deleted my email account, and sent my new number and address to my ex-husband’s email.

I phoned BT to complain, and was advised that I should have told them to delete his email from my account.

Why it was on there in the first place five years after our divorce I have no idea, but perhaps the woman should have alerted me that she was about to send my details to a random, strange man I’d not mentioned.

After another hour-long phone call, BT then emailed to say they would be starting my service at the new address two weeks early, and had booked an engineer to arrive ten days before I would.

Frustrated: The columnist has become annoyed with long phone calls to call centres

God only knows what will transpire when I phone up to cancel my Sky TV. I don’t think it is just me who has all these problems.

The other day, on a fashion shoot, the photographer spent ages on his mobile, asking Virgin why it had arrived to remove his TV equipment at home when it was the people in the flat upstairs who had cancelled their service. They have cut him off four times in the past three weeks.

When I reached the end of my tether with BT and its endless, automated emails, I asked the woman in the BT chairman’s office why her employee had cut me off a month early and emailed my ex-husband.

She said it was ‘human error’.

I asked what they were going to do about the fact she got pretty much every bit of her job wrong. ‘We will look into it internally.’

Now we are being told that mistakes made in the assessment of the bidders for the West Coast rail franchise were the result of a ‘brain drain’, and that civil servants in that department are not paid enough.

But you don’t need to be a genius to work out that giving the line to FirstGroup would have been wrong.

A rabbit without even an NVQ who caught a First Great Western train from the West Country to Paddington would know this service is expensive, the trains filthy, and the moment rush hour is over, trains stop at every station along the way, doubling the journey time.

You need a degree in computer science to even book a ticket – ‘a return fare MAY be cheaper’ – well, is it or isn’t it?

In a FGW buffet car recently, the man serving told me he couldn’t microwave the porridge as there was ‘no chef on board’.

Every time I interact with BT, or Santander, I end up wanting to eat my own head, or stab someone.

But there is never any retribution. They all plod along, making mistakes, taking our money, wasting our time, making us go blind with rage and frustration.